The movie tells
the story of the activism by ACT UP in the 1980s and 1990s to get research developing
treatments for HIV on the federal agenda. How to Survive a Plague reminds the
viewer that even as the President referred to Stonewall in his inauguration speech last week, it was once acceptable for religious leader Pat Buchanan to use the
threat of the virus to tell gay people to be celibate. The people most affected
by the virus, including gay people, were extremely marginalized in the early
years of the epidemic.

One of the people featured in the movie is Garance Franke-Ruta, now Senior
Editor with The Atlantic, who was a
teen activist with ACT UP. Franke-Ruta attended a few meetings with Prostitutes
of New York (PONY) as part of the Women's Committee of ACT UP. Terry McGovern, founder of the HIV Law
Project and a member of ACT UP during the years described in How to Survive a Plague,
who is now at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, recalled
that, "All of the women's stuff early on included sex workers. People from
PONY were doing part of the organizing around the expansion of the CDC
definition of AIDS to include symptoms experienced by women, and they were part
of everything that went on around women's issues."

Members of PONY and ACT UP overlapped, but the enthusiasm
and insistence of ACT UP's emissaries was viewed with skepticism by some of the
sex workers of PONY. Tracy Quan, author and PONY member, contrasted two aspects
of collaboration. In addition to ACT UP's Women's Committee, PONY participated
with Gran Fury, ACT UP's unofficial propaganda arm, in an art show aimed at
shaping the image of people living with HIV, mounted at the New Museum of
Contemporary Art. Quan said, "We had a more collaborative relationship in my
experience with Gran Fury. The ACT UP Women's Committee, I didn't feel it that
way. I felt it was more like feminists wanting to shape the PONY agenda," essentially
seeing these meetings with the Women's Committee as an attempt to make PONY the
sex worker wing of ACT UP.

Sex worker rights is a hard cause to find support for among
women's organizations now. Quan is sanguine about this, saying, feminists
"recognize that we can't really be controlled by feminism. It upsets some
people who are looking for alliances with women's organizations, but it's a
healthy sign. We needed them to get started but we have moved into a human
rights area away from strictly seeing sex work as women's rights." Some
feminists have attacked sex workers. Sienna Baskin, co-director of the Sex
Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center, said, "While some feminists
include sex workers in their vision for gender equity, other feminist
institutions shy away from or directly oppose sex workers' struggle for rights.
Some feminist scholars even disparage the sex workers rights movement, claiming
that its leaders are victims of a 'false consciousness' or are trying to harm
women."

Melissa Gira Grant, a journalist and former sex worker,
describes the achievements sex workers have made in HIV prevention, saying, "We turned the tide, along with sex
workers around the world, from being seen as 'vectors of disease,' to experts
with valuable solutions." However, she agrees with Baskin and points out the
ways that some well-known feminists use their influence to attack HIV programs
lead by sex workers. "But now I see that balance slipping back, as some
organizations and their leadership attempt to link sex workers to what they
want to call 'sex trafficking.' In these campaigns that make no distinction
between forced labor or migration and prostitution, they also attack sex workers'
public health and community organizing projects, like the work done by peer
health educators in brothels in India, which Gloria Steinem, on a recent trip
to a red light district there, accused of being 'pimps' and 'traffickers.'
Why are anti-trafficking advocates disrupting sex workers' health projects? Why
are they comparing a condom one sex worker gives another to 'giving a mouth
guard to a battered woman,' as one anti-trafficking organization in Washington,
DC told a sex worker at a HIV prevention program?"

Feminists are not the only people one could expect to
support sex worker organizing but who do not.Today, gay men and HIV organizations have achieved a level
of mainstream respect that might never have been accomplished without ACT UP. Sex
workers have turned to HIV organizations and gay organizations seeking support,
meeting space, and shared agendas. However, members of the Sex Worker Outreach Project in New York
described a distinct lack of support from gay organizations and from feminists.
Sarah Jenny Bleviss said, "Mainstream
gay rights and women's groups have made little effort in my decade of sex
worker organizing to reach out and bridge connections. The solidarity is not
there and I think it is in part because we are still dealing with some of the
most stigmatized among the marginalized. We've had better luck connecting with
the labor movement."

Today, gay people are in most places less stigmatized and
less criminalized than sex workers, more respected in the mainstream. Quan
points out that, "This collaborative and friendly relationship with Gran Fury
was before men were getting married and pushing strollers. Gay men were
engaging in recreational party sex and sex workers were providing recreational
sex, outside procreation. But there is this whole wing of gay culture now that
is very family-values oriented." Some sex worker activists speculate that gay
organizations may not want to be tainted with the lack of respectability of sex
workers. Will Rockwell, a
male sex worker and member of SWOP-NYC, points out that the gay mainstream
tends to "sanitize" those it champions as victims, comparing the lack of
attention to gay hustlers killed while working to the greater attention paid to
victims of anti-gay bullying. He wrote a piece in New York's Gay
City Newspleading with
the gay mainstream to consider how its "politics of respectability" had systematically
excluded many of the most vulnerable members of the LGBT community, obscuring a
legacy that included LGBT sex workers at its roots. Rockwell has noted that the
"Compton's Cafeteria Riot and Stonewall consisted of hustlers and sex-trading
transgender women of color throwing bottles." Sex workers face high levels of
HIV and violence but remain underserved by HIV programs and anti-violence
efforts. Support from feminist and gay organizations could make an enormous
difference in these struggles.

Comments on Melissa Ditmore's blog entry "Oscar Buzz: How to Survive a Plague, and the History of Sex Workers with ACT UP"

Really appreciate much about this informative article. Also it would be awesome to see cross cutting movement organizing against the criminalization of sex work and the criminalization of HIV! Sex workers also face HIV criminalization.

So important to organize in light of what you speak of in the last paragraph, the ways in which sex workers and/or trans women of color and gender non conforming people, homeless queer and/or trans youth etc are really left out of neoliberal mainstream non profit "LGBT" priorities and agendas as well as homonormative historical narratives.

Really inspirational to see diasporic AIDS activist organizing by sex workers in India, South Africa, Brazil. Would love to see more conversation about these connections and about ways to organize AIDS activists, politicized non profits and ASOs, queer and/or trans collectives and current ACT UP chapters against sex work, HIV criminalization i.e. the prison industrial complex

I’ve had loads of a success in getting labor, political and LGBT political groups support for our agenda on the west coast. I recently got our local LGBT political club to pass a resolution calling on our state legislatures to enact anti discrimination legislation on our behalf because one of my friends who was raped in her home was denied access to the state victim’s compensation fund because she and her assailant were association with a particular sw chat board. Last year I got several political groups to pass a resolution calling for our congressional members to removal of the anti prostitution oath from the international AIDS funding when it comes for renewal in 2013.....